A conversation with elèuthera

A conversation with elèuthera

Curated by the editors of the anarchist journal ‘Seeds Beneath the Snow’

Translated by Giovanna Gioli

elèuthera – which means “free” in Greek – is also the name that a group of English heretics, fleeing from religious persecution, gave to the island in the Bahamas where they landed in the mid seventeenth century. There, the Eleutheran Adventurers established a community of “free and equals”, a remarkable libertarian experiment, albeit short-lived. Taking their cue from the Adventurers (as exemplified in the Publishing house’s logo), the ‘elèutheran of Milan’ embarked into their publishing journey in 1986, en route to a better world too… a fortunate and eventful journey, which proved to be less short-lived, as a few decades later they are still here, deliberately small and stubbornly libertarian.

On average, elèuthera publishes about 25 titles annually (including new titles and new editions), elegantly edited and graphically refined, this latter thanks to the invaluable work of award winning-graphic designers like Ferro Piludu (1930-2011) and, later, Riccardo Falcinelli. The frequency of the reprints of existing titles is a testament to the intellectual value of the selected texts over time. The average age of the editors is around 50 years old, but averages are misleading as currently there are three older (around 70) and 3 younger people (between 30 and 40).

Seeds Beneath the Snow [SBS]

The story of elèuthera – which begins in the mid-1980s – is also the story of a libertarian group that moves from political militancy to a more ‘cultural dimension’ of militancy. What determined this transition and the subsequent beginning of the publishing house's activities?

Elèuthera

To begin with, let us clarify that the roots of the group are openly anarchist, and are grounded in the daily practice of militancy, which was very common at the time (the 1960s and 1970s). The publishing project was born in 1986 on the initiative of two members of the Black Flag anarchist group and had a different scope: it was a libertarian ‘publishing house’ (if we want to use this somewhat pompous term), hence it was not strictly anarchist, regardless of the granitic beliefs of its founders. It is not mere semantics, or a beautification attempt to not scare the public away... Far from it, it is the conscious choice - as anarchists - to open to those fellow travellers who, despite not adhering to a specific ideology, cultivate profoundly libertarian values, methods and visions. There was (and still is) a long way to go.

What determined the transition from predominantly militant action to predominantly cultural action (as the two elements are closely intertwined) was the changed historical and cultural context. After two very busy decades of social and political action (and so very twentieth century, in hindsight), we had found ourselves with outdated socio-political methods, rooted in an imaginary which had in turn lost its meaning. They had become mere rhetoric. Consoling but ineffective liturgies. It was hence necessary to find new methods, stemming from today’s demands. In other words, the twentieth century was over, and the future (more nebulous than bright) was yet to be invented.

So, we focussed on the present, eleuthera was born there - in the uncertain territory in between an era and the next- to respond to a demand that outlives historical (re)occurences, i.e. the need to explore new territories and building new paths towards social change. Ultimately, it boils down to this: it may no longer be the nineteenth-twentieth century revolution, but what remains is the urge to change the world.

We aimed at bringing together the many instances simmering in both the anarchist milieu -which no longer coincided with the anarchist movement, and the ever-evolving libertarian constellation, as hotbed of contemporary experimentations. This is why elèuthera’s catalogue includes authors who are not anarchist, strictly speaking, but are part of a multifaceted international libertarian culture that actively promotes a fertile antiauthoritarian thought.

SBS: But why books?

The printed media has traditionally played a central role in the national and international anarchist movements, be it periodicals, or books and pamphlets, propaganda - as it was once termed. Despite the high rates of illiteracy, the printed media were key. Things have changed over time, clearly, but in the 1970s books and journals were still widespread in the anarchist movements. So, the path to publishing appeared broad and welcoming, and we took it. By ‘we’ here I refer to many germane initiatives, like the periodicals “A rivista anarchica”, “Volontà”, “Interrogations”, “Libertaria” and, obviously, the publishing house “Antistato”, which all pre-date elèuthera. Ultimately, the core group we mentioned before had a thing for printed media, initially as amateurs, and progressively with increased competence. And passion.

We have therefore chosen to focus more on an what we have previously defined as "cultural". This calls for a clarification on the term ‘culture’, as it can mean different things and is open to misunderstandings. In our research, we neither take our cue from the so-called "high" culture (we leave abstraction and disciplinary boundaries to the specialists), nor we follow the "low" culture (often vulgarity passed off as genuine popular culture). The essence of our work,  - which has always been based on the inseparable dyad thought/action - points rather to the anthropological definition of the term: culture as self-determination, the self-production of society, or better the collective creation of the symbolic codes that inform the everyday life of every culture (language, gestures, social and family ties, food, art...).

In other words, we are interested in action that becomes thought and thought that becomes action, and in the ways in which a society establishes itself. Accordingly, we do not merely promote the critique of domination (which is in any case out of question, as it is what we live through), but we pursue the construction of the new.

Here we must resort to the concept of prefiguration. The term is of Anglo-American origin and has gained traction recently, but as a practice it is much older and was widely spread in anarchist circles. For example, in Italy in the second part of the twentieth century the debate on "living anarchy in the here and now" was central, and international discussions, even harsh ones, on lifestyle anarchism were widespread. Anyhow, the topic here is relevant because elèuthera is not just a publishing enterprise, with a company name, a VAT number, an annual turnover, etc.  This is of secondary importance, because elèuthera - far from being a "company" (to be sure, it is a cooperative) - is a place of life and work where we can experiment with anarchist practice. And this has nothing to do with publishing anarchist texts: it has to do with all the (experimental and fallible) methods we must come up with to manage cooperatively and horizontally an endeavour that is cultural and economic. And such endeavour does not take place in an "ideal" society, but in a real society, shaped by capitalism and statism. A big challenge, but it is also what imbues the project with meaning.

SBS: Our second question focuses on a different topic, even if closely linked to our overall discussion. Since the beginning of your adventure, almost 40 years ago, you have been distributed in bookstores, you are on the market. What are the outcomes of these decades of activity, if we may ask? We are painfully aware of the difficulties, pitfalls, and inconsistencies of operating within the distribution system. This is why we are interested in understanding the difficulties faced by a concrete libertarian experience like elèuthera -which is structurally anti-system- and yet operates within the very system it rejects. This paradox is shared by all the concrete experiences rooted in the here and now to which, as a quarterly, we want toot give voice to.

Our choice to be on the market marked an important change of pace between the new editorial project and its predecessor, the Antistato publisher (1975-1985), which was run by the same people who later founded elèuthera. This was not an easy choice because the idea of creating a "counter-society" outside or on the margins of the dominant economic circuits to experiment with sustainable alternatives has always been a strong need. Antistato lay entirely within this vision, it was born with the emerging global movements, in years in which social protest was way livelier and more creative than today. Different ways of living and working were constantly experimented with. Obviously, many of these ended up in nothing, but there was certainly a collective effort to find immediately viable alternatives. And then came the stagnant decade [riflusso] of the 1980s. Groups disbanded, offices< closed, and the lifeblood of militant circuits, the desire to read and discuss that had allowed us to remain (almost) outside the market, faded away... At that point the "choice" was almost forced, the new editorial project had to enter the book market.

It was therefore a pragmatic decision, not a principled one. A carefully thought-out decision, as accessing the book market entails significantly higher costs and a proportionate, or better, a disproportionate work commitment. Our choice was made considering a strongly felt need: to reach a wider audience. We did not want to preach to the converted, but rather engage in a dialogue with those many who, while remaining outside of any ideology, reject the world as it is and seek intrinsically libertarian solutions. With the aim of reaching out to this vast libertarian and post-ideological arena, beyond militant circuits, we have decided to expose ourselves, to make ourselves more visible and "enter the market". But we did it on our own terms, that is, with one foot in and one foot out. An uncomfortable position which however kept us always alert. We thus managed to find our (precarious) balance. In other words, the market has not swallowed us up, even if we have had to come to terms with certain rules and certain procedures. What is certain is that we managed to reach the libertarian constellation mentioned above, which constitutes the core of our readers.

[SBS]: Has this choice [to be on the market] changed your workstyle?

It did not so much change it as complicate it. We have had to "bend" external needs (mostly administrative-bureaucratic) to our working style. Since we have had an editorial board (more or less since the beginning of the 2000s, before it was a collective of two...) our style has been cooperative and horizontal. This means that in principle there are no specialised tasks, everyone does everything. In practice, however, reality has forced us to make some adjustments, as some specialized skills are required. Hence, while we accept the individualisation of some skills, the criteria to manage each sector are discussed and decided upfront by everyone. It goes without saying that the selection of the titles, the themes, and the authors is evidently the work of the entire editorial collective.

So, to put it shortly, yes, being on the market requires some adjustments, but the essence of our cooperative workstyle is not affected. This latter rests on two pillars: the continuous and explicit tension between effectiveness and efficiency, and an artisanal method of production. By choice and by necessity, we must have a rather high level of efficiency to maintain constant publication rates and quality. The fear is that this efficiency could "crush" the effectiveness of collective work, which instead requires sharing and extended time. Hence, this tension is an integral part of our daily work- yet another uncomfortable position which keeps us always alert.  The artisanal method, reminiscent of Proudhon, is the working dimension that appears most congenial to us, as it combines manual work and intellectual work. Contrary to popular belief, a book is not a purely intellectual product at all, it is rather the result of multiple manual (and even artistic) skills, production, an artefact that gives its craftsman an exquisitely tangible satisfaction.

[SBS]: How do you select the titles for your catalogue?

Apart from the key criterion of selecting the most innovative and original expressions of anarchist and libertarian thinking, we are very pragmatic in the selection of themes and authors. The reasons for publishing a book vary:  its topicality, which responds to a general demand for more in-depth explorations, but also how untimely a text is, how it deals with topics that are not yet popular, but we anticipate that they will be soon (here we have often been right, but the concept of "soon" is admittedly a bit random...). Even issues of complexity or accessibility are criteria that we always keep in mind: they are not mutually exclusive, but they certainly require a careful balance. A "historical" trait of our catalogue is interdisciplinarity, a crossbreeding of different knowledges that gives rise to original perspectives. Then, there are the so-called "cultural operations", those titles with no commercial appeal which we publish nonetheless, as they add meaning and coherence to our vision. It goes without saying that we unfortunately must ration these "operations". Finally, we carefully follow what is produced by the counterculture, along with international research work, and many germane publishing initiatives in disparate fields.

[SBS]: Notably, in elèuthera’s catalogue there is a vast percentage of translated texts

Indeed, we are positive that a "national" vision of culture is completely obsolete, especially for staunch internationalists like us. To be sure, the attention to the "here" is not lost. You live and act in a specific place and what surrounds you is your social habitat. But social dynamics are now global and therefore we must carefully follow what is happening on a planetary level, also to move beyond Westerncentrism. So, yes to many translations, despite the additional effort in terms of editing and budget that this entails.

[SBS]: Is your research work generally recognized and appreciated or does it go unnoticed?

We often get positive feedback, which undoubtedly helps us to "keep going".  Such recognition (not free from criticism) comes both from libertarian circles and from "experts" (booksellers, scholars, journalists, readers). Generally, we get recognition for our research work and the high-quality standards of our publications, but also for the political project behind it: to bring anarchism back into the contemporary cultural, political, scientific and ethical debate. We have been pursuing this objective for some time, but recently it was unexpectedly strengthened by the rereading of Emma Goldman (we have just published an anthology of her work with some unpublished texts in Italian). Our Emma (and our Errico [Malatesta] was no different) was very clear about whom she was addressing when she wrote articles or held conferences: she was not addressing the faithful ones or her followers, but she spoke out loud to the entire world. Humbly, we are trying to do the same thing, to allow anarchist voices to resonate loud and clear outside the walls of our ghetto (a ghetto in which we locked ourselves up). It is time to go out and talk loud like Emma. Certainly, we do not want to repeat late twentieth-century slogans (at best, as some date back to the nineteenth century), we want to reclaim the place of anarchism in the public agora. This is dangerous, there is a risk of being distorted, misrepresented, swallowed up, but it is in the very place of logos and praxis that elèuthera strives to bring back anarchism.

[SBS]: To sum up, your vision as a publisher has a double goal. On the one hand, the (partly achieved) objective to make the militant circuits less self-referential by exposing them to different worlds. On the other hand, you enrich society with libertarian and anti-authoritarian ideas. We see a double strengthening effect.

You can say so, although in this game of mutual influences it is not so easy to “draw the line”. Clearly, we are quoting Paul Goodman and his warning to always have a clear awareness of where to set one's limit, knowing full well that it cannot be drawn once and for all, but must be constantly redefined. Positioning oneself by choice on the threshold between inside and outside, between marginality and mainstream, requires constant attention, which obviously does not shield us from missteps. Ultimately, what matters is to get up, dust yourself off and resume the same precarious posture with a little more awareness.

[SBS]: Going through the titles that you have been publishing (very regularly!) year after year, we can detect the growing presence of libertarian approaches from the most diverse disciplinary fields, and this pertains the hard sciences too.  Are we witnessing a rebirth of anarchist thought, or is it just a prospective illusion?

Over the past thirty years - thanks to the fall of twentieth-century ideologies - attention to anarchist thought has increased both in the social sciences and in the "hard" sciences, albeit in rather peculiar ways. Such renaissance is often born out of a split, the split between anarchist thought and political movements. This split has allowed a theoretical use of anarchist ideas - in some instances very fruitful - without any tangible social impact. Simply put, the critique of domination without embarking on any struggle to overthrow it. Sure enough, this separation between the world of ideas and the real world has been defined as philosophical anarchism as an entity separated from political anarchism, which is embodied in social movements. We are about to publish the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who criticizes with great insight this depoliticized anarchism which arbitrarily separates anarchist principles and values from ways of social action. Malabou focuses on contemporary philosophy, but the same argument holds for other disciplines.

We can say that anarchist thought has become more influential, but in this neutralised version. This said, there are still some positive effects, especially in the fields of knowledge traditionally attentive to anarchism, such as anthropology or ecology, but also in decidedly surprising fields of knowledge such as economics (so far dominated by Marxist and liberal thought), or biology. Especially in the latter field we find extremely innovative approaches that are reconfiguring scientific knowledge with a radical questioning of the dominant paradigms and the hierarchical imaginary underpinning them. Just think of biologist Jean-Jacques Kupiec and his vision summarized in the phrase: "neither god nor gene".

[SBS]: Regarding this misappropriation of anarchist ideas (a complete distortion in some cases, see how cooperation practices are incorporated into management theories) - we can agree with what Colin Ward said in an interview published years ago in “Libertaria”. Colin speculated that in the twenty-first century anarchists might no longer be called that. In his view, this mattered little, as what truly matters is that their ideas continue to be translated into actual practices, regardless of how we choose to define ourselves. The problem lies precisely here, as today we see very little anarchist, and in all fairness, very little action at all. It is a more widespread issue, not just for anarchists. The world has changed too quickly, and we have not been able to adapt, our society is based on obsolete models. This brought us in the current impasse. Anarchist ideas no longer goes hand in hand with the anarchist political movement. They are faster. We feel this problem with urgency. Perhaps it is a good thing that anarchist ideas endure, even without anarchists who define themselves as such, however in some respects this entails an a-historical dimension. Coming back to elèuthera, in your opinion, what is vital in anarchist thought today? What did you let go of instead? What have you intentionally discarded from tradition?

Let's put it this way: we have not discarded anything from tradition because we have no intention of erasing the past. However, our task is to invent the present, to imagine new ways of acting and thinking, adapting them to the changed historical circumstances. Hence, we do not throw away tradition, but we put it in its right place: the past. A past we are proud of, but which should not be replicated, or it is doomed with irrelevance. On the contrary, like every new generation of anarchists, we must continually reinvent anarchism as, by definition, anarchism is always in becoming (as put by Tomás Ibáñez).

[SBS]: Let us now move on to a more technical question: what are the daily problems, the administrative or financial conundrums faced by a self-managed and egalitarian publishing project that operates as an alternative to the dominant way of producing? And how can we all support an endeavour like this?

As mentioned before, being on the market has pros and cons, especially in terms of economic management. We must deal with a world that is alien and infuriating to us, with its rules and its barriers. And yet, as the years went by, we realised that to keep our project alive we had to abide to certain bureaucratic procedures, however absurd they sounded to our libertarian ears. This said, we try, our best, to uphold a horizontal ethos and think together, sharing our decision making, especially when things get tricky. In recent years some (powerful) players in the publishing market have transformed it heavily, overturning the rules. This prompted our dialogue with publishers close to us, with whom we are trying to figure out alternative ways of managing the book market (which already exist in Spain and France, for instance). We see experimentation and dialogue between those who feel the need to change some of the rules. The most positive part is that this discussion is from below, and not top down, and pursue a more horizontal management of the relationships between the different actors in the book supply chain.

From a strictly economic point of view, the revenue from book sales is just enough to keep things going. In the commercial circuit the margins are very narrow: only around 40% of the cover price goes to the publisher, and such a narrow margin (which is affected by production costs, management costs, labour remuneration, and copyright when requested) rarely allows us to "invest" in things we would like, such as: more translations from less translated languages, which imply higher costs;  larger volumes, which would entail an excessive selling price; titles on interesting topics, but too specific for an already choking market... As mentioned before, elèuthera is a cultural and political project, not a commercial enterprise, but we must face reality. For what concerns the issue of labour, for the first two decades elèuthera relied exclusively on its founders’ voluntary work (or better on militancy). Then, fortunately, the project expanded and we retribute daily work according to financial availability (apart from the retired members of the collective, who continue to work for free).

As per the second part of your question, what can be done to support us, there are many ways. Aside from reading our books... it is important to talk about them, make them visible to those who perhaps do not visit bookstores much - word of mouth remains the most effective way to sell books (including bestsellers) - or even promote them at local bookstores that are not familiar with our work. Another good practice is to make our work known in your own political arenas, not just by selling books but by organizing cultural initiatives that amplify our themes, thus triggering productive discussion. Another way to support our project is to make your skills available, whether you are a lawyer or a plumber by profession.  To be sure, a solidarity network based on skills has always been in place, even if more so in the past. Over our decades of experience such solidarity has withstood the blows of neoliberal individualism and is what allows us to continue our work.

[SBS]: Let us conclude by addressing the seemingly uncertain future of the book. Are we sure that the future will be increasingly digital? Is the decline of paper an inevitable destiny?

There are no certainties, however we can draw some hypotheses and probable scenarios. One thing is indeed certain: the digital is a reality that has now occupied many spaces of communication, relationships, propaganda and knowledge. In fact, it is a paradigm shift (from material to immaterial) as big as the replacement of oral transmission with written transmission five centuries ago, thanks to the invention of the printing press. This said, we are convinced that the days of printed paper are not numbered, because of its own specific value. Those who share this view do not make a living out of paper, they are rather educators, doctors, and psychologists who study learning and memorization techniques. Whilst information reduced to news is increasingly digital (and is replacing traditional newspapers), texts that imply study, concentration and in-depth analysis still require paper. As we focus decidedly on non-fiction, we are not afraid of digital competition (at least not immediately). But there is another argument to be put forward: we are not just a publishing house, we are a cultural project. So, ultimately, who cares if paper, digital or even orality will prevail in the future, whatever happens we have a political and cultural project to carry forward, and we work with the contingencies of our time. As mentioned before, anarchism is always evolving, and so are we.

On this last point, it may help to remember a healthy provocation that Amedeo Bertolo (1941-2016), founding member of elèuthera, would present to us every year. Relentlessly, when the budget season arrived, he would ask the same questions: is it worth continuing this experience? Has it given all it had to offer? Is it better to end it and set new goals for ourselves?  Is our project becoming an end in itself, an institution that reproduces itself by inertia? Well, every year we continue to ask ourselves these same questions and self-reflect on our work. The risk of reproducing ourselves by inertia, of becoming self-referential, is always there. But there are also remedies, including the self-dissolution of the avant-garde, as René Lourau taught us many years ago.